"In 1995, the Security Council mandated an international commission to inquiry to investigate into crimes that happened in Burundi in 1993," Sinunguruza said "The commission made a report to the Security Council saying that there had been a genocide. But the Council did not react, for reasons we still do not understand today."

Burundi's Tutsi-led government and rebels from the Hutu majority have blamed each other for the atrocities since 1993, when Burundi's first elected Hutu president, Melchior Ndadaye, was assassinated after three months in office and extremist Hutu groups responded with attacks on Tutsis. Human rights groups have blamed both sides for the more than 200,000 deaths in the ensuing five years.

The lack of Council involvement in Burundi's turmoil - despite repeated requests from the government for an international tribunal to try genocide and crimes against humanity there - have rankled many African officials over the years.

When asked why the Council approved peacekeepers for Rwanda but not Burundi, one UN ambassador bitterly responded: "Perhaps the Burundians just came too late." This was in reference to US worries about UN peacekeeping following the 1993 deaths of US soldiers in Somalia. Later, other Africans privately complained that the main Council powers had no intention of investigating the Burundi killings.

"We would not like an International Criminal Court under the control of the permanent five (member states) of the Security Council," Sinunguruza argued Thursday. The Council, he said, made political decisions, which he contended might not serve the needs of justice because there should not be "two weights, two measures" for the ICC.

The bad blood over the lack of a Burundi tribunal has increased in recent days, as the Security Council has begun to consider the prospects for a war crimes tribunal for the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where one UN team said genocide against Rwandan Hutu refugees may have occurred in 1996-97.

Sinunguruza disputed that the alleged crimes in Congo were as serious as those in Burundi, adding to Bujumbura's suspicions of a double standard. The justice minister contended that, even if an ICC were not equipped to try crimes retroactively - as nations have widely agreed - some tribunal body, or perhaps even the Rwanda war crimes tribunal in Arusha, Tanzania, should look into his country's post-1993 killings.